Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren, original name Ilynea Lydia Mironoff, (born July 26, 1945, London, England), British actress especially known for her role as Detective Jane Tennison on the television series Prime Suspect (1991–96, 2003, 2006) and for her subtle and sympathetic portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006), for which she won an Academy Award.

While still starring in theatre productions, Mirren began her film career in her early 20s. Her first film to be released was A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), which was followed by dozens of others, including the English gangster movie The Long Good Friday (1980); the King Arthur spoof Excalibur (1981); and a love story set in Northern Ireland, Cal (1984), for which she won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival. Mirren later played the unfaithful wife of a grotesque English thief in the controversial The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) and Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994), a role for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. In 1997 she married director Taylor Hackford.

Mirren extended her successful film career into the 21st century. She was nominated a second time for a best supporting actress Oscar, for her role as an English housekeeper in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001). In Calendar Girls (2003) she played a middle-aged Yorkshire woman who convinces her friends to pose nude for a calendar benefiting leukemia research. Mirren won both a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award and an Academy Award for best actress for The Queen (2006), a fictionalized account of the ineffectual response of Elizabeth II to the untimely death of Diana, princess of Wales, in 1997. She subsequently appeared in the adventure movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) and portrayed a newspaper editor in the thriller State of Play (2009).

Mirren’s later film roles continued to demonstrate her versatility. Her supporting turn as Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya, in The Last Station (2009) earned her a fourth Oscar nomination. She then portrayed a former CIA assassin in the action comedy Red (2010) and, in a bit of cross-gender casting, starred in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the sorceress Prospera (originally Prospero). Mirren appeared as a brassy busybody in Brighton Rock (2010), an adaptation of the Graham Greene crime novel, and as a no-nonsense nanny in the comedyArthur (2011). In the political thriller The Debt (2011), she played a former Mossad agent grappling with her past.

In 2012 Mirren portrayed Alma Reville, the wife of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, in the biographical Hitchcock. The following year she provided a voice for the animated Monsters University and returned to the steely role she had played in Red for the film’s sequel, Red 2. She crossed blades with Indian actor Om Puri in The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), in which the two played the owners of competing restaurants. In Woman in Gold (2015) Mirren portrayed Maria Altmann, a Jewish refugee who successfully sued the Austrian government to recover paintings by Gustav Klimt stolen from her family by the Nazis during World War II. Eye in the Sky (2015) featured Mirren as a British colonel who faces a moral dilemma while remotely commanding a military operation in Kenya intended to apprehend a terrorist. Her subsequent movies from this period included the drama Collateral Beauty (2016), the sentimental comedyThe Leisure Seeker (2017), and the period horror filmWinchester (2018). Mirren also played the villainous Mother Ginger in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018), an adaptation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 19th-century ballet.

In addition to her film work, Mirren starred in various television roles. Her most-notable performance was as Jane Tennison, a tough detective constantly under pressure to prove that she can succeed in a traditionally male field, in the BBCtelevision series Prime Suspect. The show aired for seven seasons and earned her three BAFTA Awards (1992–94) and two Emmy Awards (1996, 2007). She also won Emmy Awards for titular performances in the TV movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999) and the miniseries Elizabeth I (2005). In the HBO movie Phil Spector (2013), about the titular record producer’s first murder trial, she portrayed a tenacious defense attorney.

Inspire your inbox –
Sign up for daily fun facts about this day in history, updates, and special offers.

By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Click here to view our Privacy Notice. Easy unsubscribe links are provided in every email.

Thank you for subscribing!

Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.